


A debt and a due

by dear_dori



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Not Beta Read, Plot Devices, Sorry Not Sorry, The narrator is rambling, Unreliable Narrator, Very Temporary Character Death, magic jargon bullshit generator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21877132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_dori/pseuds/dear_dori
Summary: Nightingale gets in a tight spot, but luckily Peter is a very special boy.Set after Lies Sleeping. Spoilers for everything.
Relationships: Beverley Brook/Peter Grant, Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	A debt and a due

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I am in love with the RoL books and the characters, and all the great stories in this fandom. It's not often that I feel the need to write, but the prompt to this story has been in my head for ages and didn't let me sleep. I haven't written anything in years and abandonned my first ever story because I thought it wasn't written well enough and I lost courage, so this time I finished writing my fic first. However I am not an english native speaker and have nobody to beta-read, so my style and grammar are probably not grade A quality. Sorry for any accidental cringe, and please don't mind the plot holes. I have not read The October Man yet.  
Disclaimer: I own nothing, and none of the explanations regarding magical stuff in this are based on canon, it's all purely plot device.  
Critique very welcome, no seriously, please.  
Hope you enjoy

There was a lot of cleanup to do after Chorley. With every new connection we found to County Gard, every goblin market transaction that was traced down, every loose end leading nowhere, we gained a clearer idea of the scope of his five-year plan. Sometimes, I was no longer so sure we could have stopped him any better way.  
  
One morning I was in early and about to lower my ass into my desk chair for some report writing when Beverley called me on my mobile. Happy about the welcome distraction I answered with an extra cheery greeting, but she wanted to talk to my boss on official business. A bit miffed, I asked why she wasn't calling the folly landline then, and she said that it couldn't be _that_ kind of official. I was getting the feeling that she had the call on loudspeaker and Tyburn might be sitting behind her, so I behaved and brought the phone down to the breakfast room where Nightingale was still sitting with his tea and newspaper, taking notes from the classified ads section. The conversation was short and of course I stayed to listen. Nightingale had already hung up the call when he handed me my phone back.

The matter was that someone had found an abandoned hiding-place inside an old air raid shelter, and in said hiding-place was found something that was very upsetting to the community. As it was very much suspected the one responsible for the offence had been Martin Chorley, the official standpoint was that it was clearly our fault for not keeping him in check and therefore our duty to see to the problem. It was dog batteries. Potentially a whole vault full of them. Bev later called again to give me the specifics, and she sounded genuinely disgusted at the recklessness of some practitioners - not all of them in general - to not only create such wicked things, employing methods that could even objectively only be called evil, and then leaving them lying around the city for some clueless teenagers to completely accidentally stumble upon during a harmless and totally legal stroll through the underground. I believed her when she promised that nothing had been touched and the place was vacated immediately, which told me that we should not expect anything short of horrifying. The exact words were “legit creepy”.

The place was well hidden away in an older part of the underground that was, as a very unofficial inquiry with Jaget Kumar revealed, completely sealed up. It took some diplomacy to have him unofficially give me the details about an access point where we would definitely not unofficially enter the sealed tunnel to get into an old bunker stuffed with falcon related devices, and it took an even heavier bit of convincing to explain to him why not only could he not come with, but he also needed to stay on call in the fully operational and very busy train station situated some twelve meters above aforementioned bunker, just in case. No matter how much I stressed that trust me, he didn’t want to know, he insisted that he didn’t and yes he did want to know. By the time I admitted that the falcon related devices in question might also be potentially explosive devices, he was groaning and just about ready to hand the phone to someone that wasn't he. Fortunately I managed to assure him that it wasn’t as bad as it sounded, and of course we hardly thought the whole ground under the station could erupt, however, modern transportation was susceptible to electronic malfunctions, and we wanted to have the option to halt everything on short notice due to technical difficulties, lest some train experience a malfunction while approaching the station at a hundredandtwenty miles per hour.  
I just wanted Jaget to know that we were taking every safety precaution, though probably unnecessary, and that in the unlikely case that we couldn't handle the probably (just not quite definitely) harmless objects a hundred percent safe, we would be sure to immediately call it in officially. And it would be best if he, you know, were already there, should it, and let me stress again the unlikelihood of the scenario, become necessary to evacuate the whole station within ten minutes due to a, uhm, gas leak.

Of course, Nightingale wouldn't let me go near a large amount of magic munitions of unknown explosive potency without at least someone who could drag us both back out if need be, and so he called Frank Caffrey. By midday, the irregular bomb squad was assembled and we were unloading equipment from a van parked front of a utility access to an underpass. Packed with all the necessities for a spelunking expedition we proceeded to look as inconspicuous as possible while being ushered through a side door where Nightingale was already waiting. He was the only one allowed to not wear a safety vest and hard hat.  
Jaget took us down a stairwell and into a tunnel, where he unlocked a fire door marked “DANGER Strictly no access Keep locked” behind which a square concrete tunnel connected to a round brick tunnel narrow enough that I could reach both walls with my outstretched fingers. It was pitch black, but reasonably dry and the air was fresh enough, so we were good with only our helmet lamps and torches.  
We waited for Jaget to get back up and radio us that he was now taking position, then I led our party according to my map and notes. Once in the right part of the tunnel the bunker was easy to find, in fact, the entry stood out like a sore thumb. A brand new blast-proof door had been put in a concrete wall which looked older, maybe it had already been put in when the rooms behind it were in use as air raid shelter. On the door itself was an ordinary number keypad with a lock and unlock button, but we didn't need to bother with that as, true to the forwarded description, the door was ajar. Light came from inside through the narrow slit. The door was heavy enough that I needed to pull with both arms to get it moving, but then it swung open easily.  
Behind the door was a barrel vaulted brick hall and I saw that it wasn't one of the air raid shelters built in the forties, but something smaller and most certainly older. It wasn't much higher than the tunnel itself, ond only about twice as wide, but a good thirty meters long. The first room was completely empty except for a metal cable duct running along the ceiling. At the opposite end was a brick wall with a doorarch and no door, and behind that another room of about the same size, brightly lit by LED lamps. This was where according to the report we would find the dog batteries.

Nightingale told Caffrey and his team to wait outside in the tunnel, then we switched off our lamps and radios and went inside.  
There were no vestigia in the bunker, in fact, there was nothing at all, even the normal background noise that clung to the whole of the underground was missing in an unmistakably unnatural way that made my spidey sense tingle. It was like stepping into a sound-proofed room and suddenly you can't hear the reverb of your own voice any more. Something was blatently wrong with this place and of course Nightingale had noticed, as I felt his signare routinely preparing a shield, just in case. Then I bumped into his outstretched arm blocking the way. He had stopped dead in his tracks, and looking at him curiously, I saw how his face was hard and his brows furrowed.  
I felt his signare flare up strongly again, but didn't recognize what forma he had released.  
‘Peter, can you make a light?’ he asked me.  
I thought it was bright enough in the vault, but obediently as ever I made a werelight. It shone bright for a split second and then vanished. A tiny, bluish afterglow hung about for a moment before it, too, went out. I tried again, with the same result.  
Well, this was inconvenient.

‘Does it feel the same to you as in the oubliette?’  
‘No, I can still finish formae,’ I replied, opening my hand again. The werelight going out looked a bit like a popping water balloon filmed in slow motion, the brightly coloured skin falling away in an instant, leaving the watery mass in balloon shape for a second longer before it all quickly melted down and away.  
‘In the oubliette, I couldn’t do spells at all. But the bubble faded over time while Foxglove was away. If this place is made the same way, it’d be remarkable that it is still working, given how it probably hasn't been maintained.’  
‘I suppose so,’ Nightingale replied, not quite sharing my questionable excitement. He glanced around the room, searching for I don't know what. That was him doing a risk assessment.  
‘It could be natural,’ I provided, ‘Ghosts, some very hungry ones? Or vampires,' I added because sometimes I still don’t know when to stop. I really hoped it wasn’t vampires.  
Nightingale looked at me and I felt intensely scrutinised. When he said nothing, I continued. ‘But Chorley also said the oubliette was specifically made for me, so maybe this one ... isn’t?’ We must have both come to the conclusion that there weren’t many possibilities who else something like this could be custom made for, and if Nightingale was worried by that, he didn’t let on. I know I was.  
‘Well, let us not waste any more time then, we have a duty to fulfill.’ That was his risk assessment being concluded. ‘The goods need to be secured. If we have time, we shall look into the particularities of the dampening field, else we must return to investigate later.’

But first he stepped back out into the tunnel to instruct Caffrey and team to stand back at least fifty meters from the bunker entry. I noticed this was a quite generous safety distance and wondered what had my boss worried.  
‘Should we call in the precautions,’ I asked, thinking about the station and trains full of people just four storeys above us, and about how the probability of traps had recently seen a drastic increase.  
‘I don't think that will be necessary just yet,’ he replied. Even though he sounded emphatically nonchalant, I could tell he was ill at ease. He looked after the retreating men until he was satisfied with the safety distance. He said he wanted to inspect the rooms for traps while I waited at the door, and he was confident that the danger of dog batteries themselves was minimal as long as nobody started a thaumonuclear chain reaction.  
‘I even suspect that the dampening ...feature is supposed to be a safety measure. It blocks magic from physically manifesting, so to prevent accidents with his devices. Which is sensible, considering the scale they seem to have planned for this operation.’  
‘Yea, surely Chorley had only the health and safety of the public in mind.’  


Nightingale told me to wait here and I watched him approach the back end of the first room, treading carefully, and taking his time to inspect every bit of every wall and especially the floor in the second room before he entered. Careful and methodical was always how he did things, but this was excessive even by his standards. He finally waved me over and didn't take his eyes off me until I was right next to him. Clearly the feeling of your magic being suffocated had set him very much on edge and this vault was currently the number one place he did not want to be. If not for the cold white light of the LED lamps I would have even thought he looked pale.  
‘Now. Let us take a look at the spoils.’

The spoils were neatly packed into wooden, but modern ammunition crates stored on heavy duty shelves. The shelves only came up to our shoulders, as the barrel vault ceiling started to curve in at this height, but covering the lengths of both side walls. Most of them very empty. Only one of she shelves held eight crates in total, spaced out evenly, probably for weight distribution. There was space for at least fifty of them in the bunker, and either Chorley had intended to use the vault for something else as well, or he had been arranging for a very serious amount of firepower. The magic-proofing hinted to the latter. The empty shelf surfaces were covered in a thin layer of dust, and I didn't see any rectangles that were cleaner than the rest, so at least nothing had been taken recently. Which was one less thing to worry about.

I tested lifting up one of the crates, very carefully of course, and while heavy they weren't too unwieldy. Lesley could have carried them no problem. Each crate contained a dozen identical dog batteries in three neat stacks. They were considerably smaller than the ones at Skygarden, and looked different. Instead of just basically home-welded slabs of metal, these seemed like factory made pieces of engineering. They had a stainless steel casing with no obvious way to open it. The size was approximately that of a desktop computer hard disk and they weighed about the same, telling me that there couldn't be only a solid block of metal inside. Nightingale thought that the casing might be for isolation.  
I asked him how much of a punch he thought these could pack. 'Definitely more than a practitioner can. Less than a real demon trap, I should think.’  
Talking of magical IDEs, turning one of the things in my hands I was getting doubts if they really were dog batteries and not something different. On one of the small sides were two ports that looked like connectors for some kind of banana plug cable, and small black plastic disk set in a hole in the case that was too small for a finger but big enough for a peg or stylus. I suspected that to be a sunk-in push button, and when I showed Nightingale this, he promptly took the battery from my hand, which I could not really be offended about because I found that I had already unconsciously started searching my vest pocket for a pen. I asked Nightingale if he didn’t think they were bombs after all, but he shook his head.  
‘They may not look as crudely made as the ones you have seen before, but the barbaric principle of their manufacture is still the same, as is their purpose. They store energy. Of course they can be detonated, however, as you have seen, that does not require a complicated apparatus. All the technological finesse is, I believe, necessary for their intended application.’

That intended application was what posed a mystery. Nightingale was very unhappy about the fact that despite all we knew, we had no clue about many little side projects Chorley had been doing.  
‘And whatever for he thought he would need this many.’ He gestured at the numerous full crates, and the additional storage space. He had a point, and my imagination conjured up a radio tower sized super lazer ominously pointing at a town from a hilltop.  
‘What will we do with them, can they be, uh, discharged? How do we know if they are even charged?’  
‘Oh, they are.’

He put the battery back into the crate it came from and I noticed his hand tremble. Quickly he picked up his cane from where it was leaning against the shelf and I saw the sinews in his wrist protrude from how hard he was gripping it. He really was looking pale now, and that said something for a man who you wouldn't think can possibly get any paler.  
‘Sir? Are you feeling alright?’  
He looked at me and I saw the moment he contemplated lying, but fortunately at this point we were beyond such things in our professional relationship.  
‘The place is giving me a headache, I think,’ he conceded and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.  
‘Let us finish and then decide how we clear all this out, and-’  
There was a loud click coming from the front room. We looked up in alarm and then I heard the whirring of a motor coming to life, and Frank Caffrey was yelling a warning as I was already up and running out towards the entry. Not fast enough to stop the automatic closer from pulling the door shut before I had reached it, and even if I had been in time the only thing I would probably have achieved was losing my fingers between a quarter ton of steel door and the frame.  
The moment the lock bolts inside jammed shut, the lamps back in the storage room went out. The only light remaining was coming from the small red LED below the "lock" button on the keypad.  
Fuck.

Nightingale was only few steps behind me and when my eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness to make out his silhouette in the dim red glow, I saw that he was using the wall to guide himself towards me.  
I switched my helmet lamp back on, but found that it didn't work. That was strange, because these things weren't exactly delicate electronics, and I was sure that I had switched it off before even entering through the vault door. I took off my hard hat and opened the battery cover on the lamp. It didn’t sound like any sandy electronics residue was coming loose inside, and only the battery fell out, so I put it back in and tried again, but the lamp stayed dark. I tried the radio, and that switched on, but after giving two tired beeps and a blink of the low power warning light, it died. It had been fully charged before I had turned it off.  
_Fuck._

There was heavy thumping on the door, and the very muffled voice of Frank Caffrey. I returned the knocks to show we were alright, and put my ear to the metal to understand him better. I shouted back that he should stand by, and turned to wait for my boss.  
‘He's asking if he should radio Kumar to call it in.’  
‘No, not yet. Just tell him to try and get the door open.’  
I shouted ‘NO CALL!’ and ‘GET DOOR OPEN!’ until I heard a rhythmic knocking from Caffrey which I took to mean that he had understood. I heard something else and pressed my ear back on the door.  
‘I think he sent his friends for equipment.’  
Nightingale was now next to me, still holding on to the wall. I heard a low hiss from him and turned my head, but it was too dark to see anything but his outline. I thought he had maybe collided with the curve of the ceiling or something, but as he was lowering himself down to sit down and wait with me, it looked as if something was giving him serious trouble. I remembered him mentioning a headache, and chose to trust he would tell me if anything was wrong.  
He had left his switched off torch by the door and I idly picked it up to test it. Nothing happened when I switched it on.  
‘None of our lamps are working,’ I informed, ‘and the radio as well. But not dusted, the batteries are dead, like completely drained. I think it's from the, uh, safety feature.’  
‘I believe you are right,’ he replied, sounding out of breath. ‘I seems to actively draw energy from everything inside the vault. I noticed that my staff has been drained inexplicably fast. It is not doing myself any good either, to be completely honest.’  
Now some people may think my govenor would be the type to heroically hide his injuries and carry on with the task until he fell over, but actually he is much more sensible than that, and he is a good copper with the knowledge that comprehensive information is key to a successful battle plan. Still I had to calculate his confession against the Nightingale understatement constant. He was probably feeling aweful. The vampire tins came to my mind again and I thought about how they felt to touch.  
‘Tactus disvitae?’  
‘Or something of very similar effect.’  
‘So that’s why the dog batteries are isolated.”  
‘Yes.’  
‘So, a bolted blast door, no magic, no radio, and it is sucking your life force?’  
‘ ... Yes.’  
‘Fuck.’

I was not reprimanded for inappropriate language. Ever since I had learned about his history with history, I had theorised that Thomas probably viewed profanity as reserved for times of war or comparably catastrophic circumstances, and possibly sex. His unspoken agreement that just now we might be truely, seriously fucked, gave me a squirming uneasy feeling in the gut.  
"Peter. How are you feeling?"  
"Err, fine."  
That was true, I actually felt perfectly normal, though I suddenly realized that this could not be expected to hold up indefinitely. The disgustingly slimy feeling in my stomach became very hard to ignore and wasn’t my head starting to hurt?  
Before I could start to feel sick I jumped up and stood before the keypad on the blast door. I punched in 1-2-3-4 and pressed the unlock button. The red LED blinked rapidly for a second, but then continued to glow steadily. Next I tried Lesley’s birthday. Then I realised that I didn't even know if the code was four digits long, so I tried her full birth date. Then I tried all possible variations, European and American date formats. Next I tried my birthday, because she totally would. Then I tried 6-6-6. After that I began putting in random geometric patterns, while trying to estimate the number of possible combinations were the code between 4 and 8 digits long, but just when I my frustration was nearing the point where I would start to shout, I thought I heard the sound of heavy steel capped boots in the tunnel outside. Excitedly I knocked on the door and promptly got an answer.  
‘They're back! With welding torches, I hope.’

I turned around because Thomas didn't answer. He was sitting with his head against the wall and in the red light I could see he had his his eyes squeezed shut and his jaw tightly clenched.  
Frank Caffrey was yelling something on the other side of the door, and I hurried to catch it.  
‘They want to cut the door bolts. He needs us to stand back. Can you manage?,’ I asked Nightingale and he nodded.  
He needed to use his cane and my arm to get up, and I had to restrain myself not to ask him if he was okey every time he flinched or winced. When he was finally upright he looked positively grey, but seemed steady enough, and with the wall to hold on to he was able to walk on his own.  
After about five meters he suddenly stopped, then his shoulders stiffened and he sucked in a harsh breath.  
‘I think this should be far enough,’ I said, hoping our liberation from this dungeon would not need to involve any explosives. ‘Why don't you sit back down?’  
He swayed and his cane clattered on the floor as he grabbed the wall, fighting for balance. I took his arm trying to stabilise him.  
‘Sir? Are you alright?’  
‘No, I-’

He folded like a house of cards and I barely managed to catch him under the arms before he could hit his head on the concrete. Having lowered him down as gently and quickly as possible I didn’t need to clap his cheek repeatedly or talk to him in an imploring manner to know he was unresponsive, so I immediately took his wrist and felt for a pulse. I didn't find it. I readjusted my thumb, pressing down hard, and waited a few seconds. Still nothing. My other hand went to his throat. Nothing.  
At this point, my conscious thought went kind of away, and made space for a different, much more reliable part of me to take over, the part I would like to be able to claim I had trained while at Hendon, but in reality, had been drilled into me by my mom when I accompanied her on cleaning jobs. The part that could diligently and efficiently follow a set of learned instructions without getting distracted. CPR, I needed to start CPR. Lay him flat on his back, ok. Air passages free, loosen his tie, open his coat, find the correct height on the sternum. I needed light. No longer thinking of the circumstances of our situation, I cast a werelight. It went out after two seconds, but I didn't pay attention to that, because with one hand I was still holding Thomas' wrist and under my thumb I had sensed a weak beat, and another. Then nothing again.

Fighting very hard against the panic rushing at me from the silence and dark, I made another light. It barely held long enough for me to see anything, but as it faded I felt an unsteady pulse, until the cold blueish ghost of my werelight died as well. Ok, so I wasn’t going crazy in addition to losing my mind

Holding my own breath, I did it again, giving it my all, focussing on that center mass that isn’t what makes my werelight bright and hot, but what I think of as the thing giving it physical inertia. My spellcasting had never been as clean as Nightingale would like it to be, and as I advanced there had started to always some wasted excess momentum which he thinks is a sign of my imprecise grasp of the formae, causing me to have growing trouble to control my spells as I learn more. He had tried hard to train it out of me and while still never quite satisfied, let me move on when he felt my sloppiness was no longer affecting my efficiency too much, and also we didn’t have ten years to get me in shape. Now, not knowing what it really was that made my werelight sloppy, I tried to concentrate as much as I could into that impurity, that inert weight. This time it held up as long as five heartbeats, and I didn’t wait before I cast the next. And the next, trying to keep it up without interruption, and in the meantime also managed to get his tie loose and check if he was breathing. He was not. FUCK.

How the hell was I supposed to keep the werelights up and simultaneously do rescue breaths? I needed something to sustain some energy around Nightingale, something that held it better than so the vault couldn't suck it up as quickly, and there was only one thing that I was hoping might do the trick. So I grabbed his cane by the silver top and did something in my palm that had nothing to do with anything Nightingale had ever showed me but felt how I imagined pressing something substantial into the metal should feel. It sent a very unpleasant shock up my arm, but something in the metal did respond in an animated way. Although not necessarily in a good way, a bit like that kind of vibration that makes your skin go numb. I quickly made another werelight while I rested the cane in Nightingale’s arm, not daring to let go of his wrist to use my other hand. Then I repeated what I had done to the cane, and could only hope that it did what I needed, and for long enough. I sensed my magic buzzing in the metal like an unhappy swarm of bees, prickling in the bones of my hand. I risked waiting until the last glow of my ghost werelight had vanished, and, mercifully, the steady beat under my thumb continued. Then I heard Nightingale gasp, and he breathed in deeply through his mouth, and I laughed in knee-weakening relief.

That was the moment when the rest of my mind returned from its vacation. My senses and thoughts, having waited patiently in the background to overwhelm me with useless data, rushed at me all at once like an army of ducklings when you finally put the feeding bowl down. Over the slow but steady pulse under my finger I felt my own heart pounding like a hydraulic power hammer, and the rushing in my ears drowned out the quiet sounds of Nightingales breaths. I held my finger under his nose to make sure he was still breathing, and restrained myself from smoothing down his messed up hair. I glanced at the door where I now heard clanging and pounding noises coming from that direction, which I hoped meant that things over there were progressing well. When I cast another werelight and looked at Nightingale, I saw his eyes were open. I sighed a short prayer of thanks to whomever might be listening and let myself sink down on my arse, thinking to myself, while the cold crept up from the floor bricks into my bones, that we had been bloody lucky.

Of course that was when the clanking at the door stopped, and after a moment of silence muffled swearing could be heard. I must have seemed so crestfallen looking from the door to Nightingale and back at the door, that he lightly squeezed my hand and moved his lips, trying to say something, but it was too quiet and I had to kneel and bend down over him.  
‘Go check,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘I’ll be holding out.’  
‘Alright.’ I said, squeezing back because of how happy I was to hear his voice. ‘One second.’  
The humming in the cane had noticeably weakened, and I strained my concentration to force one more good charge in. ‘Hold this,’ I told him as I put the silver top, now warm from me handling it all the time, in his hand. Nightingale wrapped his fingers around the metal and watched me shake out my arm which felt like I had taken a nasty hit right on my funny bone. ‘Be right back.’ I made another ghost werelight for him and hurried to the door.  
After some knocking and yelling on both sides of the blast door, I got into communication with Frank Caffrey. The problem was that their mobile arc-welding setup had stopped working soon after they had made a hole the outer layer and were ready to start cutting the lock bolts. Their hundred and sixty pounds fire truck battery had inexplicably died. Frank had already sent his guys up for a replacement, but I told him to radio them not to bother and get explosives instead, or thermite or whatever they had up their sleeves that was quick and not powered by electricity.

Nightingale must have been feeling better already, because he had propped himself up against the wall with the help of his cane. I crouched down in front of him and made a werelight to look at him properly, and found that he looked like I should tell him to better lay right back down. He was trembling all over, his forehead was shiny from sweat, and his skin looked entirely too translucent. I took his wrist again to check his pulse, his hand was alarmingly cold.  
‘You should save your energy, you know,’ I mumbled, and he shot me a crooked smile like I had said something funny. ‘Your energy, you mean,’ he said and let his head rest back against the bricks. ‘I’m afraid I have no influence on the matter.’  
I suddenly was acutely aware of the fact that although the skin on my arm was tingling uncomfortably and my head felt like my skull was a half size too small for my brain, I was otherwise still feeling perfectly fine. Now, considering how Nightingale was somewhat of an unusual case, any difference between how he and I reacted to something magical could just as well be caused on his end as on mine, so I really had no idea if he was the only one affected by the vault or if I was the only one who wasn’t. Chorley and Lesley had presumably been in here, but it had taken quite a while before it had started to eat at Nightingale, so if it was everyone but me, they could have limited their exposure time, or maybe used some kind of protective gear. The only thing I really knew for sure was that for some reason, while the neat Newtonian part of my spells got devoured like sugar by a four year old, whatever extra thing I apparently got going on seemed to be a bit tougher to chew on.  
I made a handful more ghostlights in a circle above us. They started melting in quick succession, which, if nothing else, looked rather beautiful. Nightingale watched the fading blue glow with an unreadable expression. ‘Whatever has she done with you,” he whispered to noone in particular.

It surprised me that not only did I know exactly who “she” was, but also, in the background of my mind, my thoughts had already been wandering in the same direction. What any of it had to do with Beverley and her family’s brand of weird bollocks isn’t something I could explain in a short and rational sounding way, suffice to say that I had done some theorising in the past and even got some nice analogies, involving symbolism as well as particle physics, to back me up. ** I thought of what she had told me once, about what we had done in the river Lugg, which she had expected me to accept as an explanation, but really wasn’t one at all. Something had definitely changed for me that night, something, as she had said, that no wizard had ever done before. Something that wasn’t in the books.

I watched the last of my ghostlights fade. Chorley was very efficient with the things that were in the books. Maybe whatever he had set up here wasn’t specialised for what I was able to dish up. Whatever it really was, though? This wasn’t a question, I realised, to which Nightingale expected to get an answer. And also one that wasn't important now. Looking the gift horse in the mouth and all that.

'If Caffrey is really bringing down the big guns now,’ I said in an attempt to seem as though I was thinking only of relevant and practical things, 'we should probably get back from the door more. You think you can move, sir?’  
'Honestly, Peter,’ he said and my heart dropped at how strained he sounded, 'I don't think I can.’  
Fuck.  
His hand curled tightly around the knob of his cane and he looked apologetic. 'This solution seems to be temporary, I’m afraid.’  
Oohh! 'That, yeah, no problem!’  
It was true that he had seemed better just a minute ago, and the energy reserves probably just needed replenishing again. That I could do, no issue at all. I made a new ghostlight for him before I took the cane, concentrated, and then blasted as much as I could into it. I felt the metal under my fingers scream with powerful tension, but also it felt like I had dislocated my shoulder. I yelped and grabbed my arm, dropping the cane.  
'Sorry.’ Rubbing and massaging my biceps, I picked it up with numb fingers and pushed it back into Nightingale's hand. He took it and made a grimasse. 'The forging is not agreeing with this.’ Yeah, I had noticed.  
But it was working. Some colour even returned to his face, and when he ventured to get up from the floor I only needed to take one arm while he steered himself along the wall with the other. My mind replayed on a loop the moment when he had been ok and upright one second and lifeless on the floor the next, and paranoid about a repeat occurrence I made sure that I had a ghostlight out all the time. Reaching the back room we took cover behind the dividing wall. I didn’t need to ask Nightingale to sit down, like a concerned girlfriend, he got the idea on his own. Short as our retreat had been, it had cost him. He looked like he had run a marathon, with insufficient prior training, and I too was disconcertingly short of breath. I put my hands on my knees to catch up on air. I really wished Caffrey could hurry up.

Away from the door and its cosy red LED it was pitch black. Luckily I am quick on the uptake when I put my mind into it and so I had learned how to isolate the hard to digest part of my werelights more. They held fifteen, sometimes twenty seconds at a time now, the downside being that it was getting really, really exhausting. I must have made some sort of sound or something because Nightingale gave me a concerned look. 'Peter, you need to be more careful,’ he said between heavy breaths, 'One of us has to stay sharp.’ I knew that when he said sharp he meant alive, but I didn’t want to talk, or think, about it.  
'Should I update the team?’, I changed the topic. 'I bet Kumar is panicking by now.’ Hopefully he had not made the call. What I really didn’t want was yet another investigation.  
Nightingale was leaning with his back against the leg of a shelf. An ammunition crate sat next to his head. 'Priorities, Peter. You can worry about that later.’

He had closed his eyes. It looked suspiciously like he might slump down any moment, so I reached for his cane to charge it some more. His hand suddenly gripped my arm and he stopped me. 'Wait,’ he whispered. ‘Pace yourself.’ We sat in the dark for a while, listening and waiting for any sounds from the door. Then I heard Nightingale release a pained little whine that I bet the contents of my tech cave he had tried extremely hard to keep in, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I searched his hand holding the cane and loosened his fingers, worried by how little resistance I got. Determined to make this one count I let the potential collect in my palm before I _shoved_.  
The metal of the cane top screeched and cracked like unstable ice on a lake and I think I blacked out for a split-second because crashing backwards into a shelf on the other side of the room took me by surprise. My arm was completely numb and I couldn't see a thing and my werelight was much too weak and I was feeling kind of dizzy and I wanted to make sure Nightingale was alright and I needed to see. My hands touched the ground and I heard him shout that I should stop. Something was on my lip and I wiped it with my hand, it was blood. Oh - so that was why Nightingale's shouting sounded so urgent.  
I felt his hands on my shoulder and then the hard, cold floor under my arse. He was asking me questions and I probably answered. In the dark I felt his hand touching my forehead and his fingers on my arm, it hurt like after an accident with a power socket. 

It took me a minute to get my wits back together. Nightingale was kneeling next to me and although I couldn't really see him I knew he was not alright. He was silent, not even hinting about how I was definitely going to get a head scan after this - and he didn't need to, I was imagining cauliflower brains vividly enough. He was trying to conserve energy.  
'Have I broken your staff?’  
'No. Almost. It can be mended.’  
‘How long do you think it will last you?’  
It was a stupid question, the answer being probably not long enough, as we both knew. I felt so useless I could have started to cry.  
Nightingale, in a calm and concise manner, began to give me instructions what to do with the dog batteries after securing them from the vault. I listened carefully and just nodded when he asked if I got it, although I imagined me interrupting him with a heartfelt speech about how we would both walk out of here and finish the job together. When he was done he got so quiet next to me that I reached for his hand again to check his pulse. It was almost too weak to feel.  
I thought about Frank and what would happen when he finally got the door open, and about Jaget, and Miriam and Alexander and how I would have to explain everything to them, and I thought of Abdul, and then of Molly.  
And then I had the idea.

It was not a reasonable idea - but so was getting my blood sucked by a fae.  
I got up with the help of my good arm. With my hands in front of me I found the opposite shelf, and from my memory I located one of the crates. I took a dog battery out and carried it into the empty front room, about the middle, which I hoped was a safe enough distance from Nightingale in addition to the wall between us, and still far enough from the vault door. There I knelt down and put the battery on the ground. In my pocket I found what I needed - I knew I had a pen on me. Feeling was back in my fingers and I managed to screw the pen open without losing any of the parts. The distant red glow from the keypad helped a bit. I wanted the spring and the ink cartridge. The cartridge turned out to be plastic, but luckily the pen had a metal clasp which I broke off. Holding it with the rubbery fabric of my reflective vest and praying for the best, I pressed it into one of the two connectors. When I counted three seconds and still hadn't been vaporised on the spot, I took the spring and put it in the other connector. Now I thought briefly about touching the spring directly to the clasp, but I knew what happened to electric things when you short a major circuit, which was nothing I wanted to happen inside a detonable device. I got up and hurried to fetch the cane from Nightingale who hardly stirred when I took it from his hand. As much as I knew I needed to look out for myself first so I could help him, l had to forcefully pull myself away before I did something stupid like fry my brain, before I even got the chance to microwave it in a magic blast instead. My actual plan was to unload the juice in the battery directly into the cane, no explosions involved, charge it up nice and good in the hopes that it could then sustain one practitioner until the rescue rangers arrived. Alternatively, it would blow up right in my face, but the boom would feed the black hole for long enough so it could stop feasting on my boss. Not ideal, I know, but I was kind of placing all my bets on horse A.

I sprinted back and put the cane down on the floor next to the battery. Holding my breath, I carefully pushed the silver top against the makeshift wiring. Nothing happened yet, and I felt the panic radiate off me in hot and cold waves as I fumbled for the pen shaft and pushed it into the hole in the casing. The button inside clicked. I pushed it again. I counted to ten. I touched the cane, it was humming slightly like a kettle that was just starting to boil. That was from before. It hadn't worked.  
I blanked out and the wish to go back and check on Nightingale crossed my mind, but I stopped myself. It wouldn't help to know, I was out of ideas.  
Or, at least out of good ideas. Grabbing the cane by its shaft, I bought it over my shoulder and braced myself. Probably not as bad as a real demon trap, Nightingale had said. I swung the cane and hit the dog battery as hard as I could.  
The casing yielded and Something happened. I had a sensation of being airborne and then the sensation of abruptly not being airborne any more as I hit a wall and then the floor. Everything tore at me from all sides and my spine felt like it was about to explode out of my body. There may have been screams.  
Then I was under water.

The orange evening sun was sending beams down between green and brown reeds. The water was shallow and still. Black tadpoles were moving between the stems and along the fine silty bottom. A fish with slick grey skin shot through the near imperceptible current, shining like silver in the refracted sunlight.  
A sharpened piece of flint fastened to a stick broke the surface and impaled the fish. The sun went down. Bright midday light gleamed on the mirror smooth surface. Slight ripples formed around where a leather cup sank down slowly toward the soft bottom, turning on its side and relinquishing its sweet content to the water. Then it was morning and there was the shadow of a flat and narrow bark, and hemp nets gliding below the surface. A hand dipped down holding a bronze pendant with a fish design, and dropped it. There were naked feet sinking into the ground and muddying up the water, and hands that went down and came back up with mussels and crabs, and there were earthen pots and small leather pouches filled with grains or herbs or amber, carefully being buried under sand and rocks. Animals came in large numbers and drank from a clear sandy pool. The moon shone bright as one sheep was lead down into the hollow and then its hot blood mixed with the cold water and its body, burdened with rocks, was put under the surface. Then there was a causeway, with big wood poles penetrating deep into the ground. People moved on it from morning to night, and beneath them in the water small coins accumulated and glistened between pebbles when the sun hit them.

The were no voices, no thoughts, no communication. It wasn’t a scene for things to happen or words to be spoken, just a tranquil painting moving through time. Rainstorms shook the earth with thunder and gusts toppled trees, but while the heavy rain whipped the surface, under it there was a deep calm. As the water welcomed the gain from above no rapid currents churned angrily, but slowly it rose over the rushes and into the meadows, and just as slowly returned in a gentle flow.

The first thing I noticed was a smell like inflatable pool toys. The second was that everything hurt. Like your calf hurts after a cramp, just on my whole body.  
I was lying on my side, in proper recovery position. I was looking at a brick wall which of course didn’t tell me much, but lights were moving around and from the ground I sensed the smell of two dozen decades worth of damp dust and gas lamps. So Caffrey’s lot had eventually gotten the door down and dragged me back out.  
My throat still tasted of nosebleed and someone had put a new, still folded up high-vis vest under my temple (which explained the new rubber smell). Trying to see something I lifted my head and immediately regretted it when my neck muscles cramped up. I groaned and then someone was beside me touching my face, and I looked up and saw Nightingale watching me with concern. I choked on something that would otherwise have been entirely embarrassing, and he put his hand under my shoulder to help me sit up. While I fought to regain my breath and composure he performed a first aid examination, never taking his hand off my back.

Walid was already on his way, and I knew my questions had to wait until I’d had a lie-down in an MRI machine. As I later learned, the the door could not be blasted open because the electric fuses didn’t work, but they had found that the old concrete was somewhat friable where it had been cut to retrofit the new frame in, and in the end they had been able to brute force the whole thing out of the wall using crowbars. Aside from the problem of every battery powered lamp and piece of equipment failing on them, nobody had noticed any adverse effect on their well-being. So that was this question answered, at least.

I thought Nightingale would go and oversee some precautions or stand guard over the vault entrance or something, but he remained crouched next to me until we were both picked up for a lazy afternoon at the hospital. As was to be expected he kindly turned down Abduls extended hospitality on the account of having things to do and people to talk to, but he did agree that clearing out the vault was a task for literally anybody else but him. I thought that after a stop by the cafeteria I should feel up for the task, but first I had to be cleared by Walid, and then return Beverley’s missed calls, which I did sitting in front of a cup of tea and a chocolate glazed donut. She hadn’t exactly been hysterical, but she said she needed to see me right now, so I made sure to meet her in the visitor parking lot where I snogged her while Jaget sat in his car waiting, looking demonstratively at his phone.

We drove by the folly to pick up several paper bags full of sandwiches, one of which I wolfed down in the car. When we arrived back in the tunnel, it was lit up with floodlights and the help of multiples cable drums that Jaget had organised while I had been enjoying the pleasures of the healthcare system. Caffrey’s team took a well-earned sandwich break during which he offered for me to wait in the tunnel while they extracted the crates with the dog batteries in shock-proof boxes, but as much as I wanted to take him up on the offer I had to be a big boy right now, and prove it, too. Afterwards, the vault was sealed with raid shields fastened with heavy duty zip ties to a narrow piece of modular construction fence, because the tunnel was not big enough to get a portable blast wall through. I was not looking forward to coming back and investigating the cause of the dampening field, as I would have to deal with that on my own.

It was dark when I got back to the folly where Nightingale was being zealously fussed over by Molly. He was looking at maps while eating canapés. If he was still feeling the aftermath of our ordeal, it didn’t show. He seemed, however, concerned about me, but there was no way I was looking into his still slightly pale face and his tired eyes and started to talk about how I was feeling, so I hurried to assure him that everything was fine, duty first talk later, job’s not done yet, of course I’m up to it.  
When I lay in bed with Bev later that night, and she held me very tightly, I finally felt safe to let the rigidity in my chest melt away. She massaged my scalp with her fingernails and told me about the day she’d had. Somewhere in there was an explanation for what had happened today, which really wasn’t one at all. She told me how sometimes a wizard didn’t need to understand every detail about how the universe balances itself, as long as for everything taken there was something given. She said not to worry, and that a debt had been accepted, and a due had been paid.

The next morning I was scheduled to drive up to Manchester, armed with Sarah and a very specific set of instructions on how to discharge dog batteries and then dispose of them in a forge.

**------- A working hypothesis on selective magic absorption: It is an established fact that there exist multiple classes of arcane phenomena, and that it is possible to differentiate them by their distinct effects but by their source as well. For example- The fairyland type of magic suppression can inhibit the casting of spells, and probably bacteria growth for some reason, but it doesn’t stunt all types of magic, else how unicorn? So, what if our forma-type magic is a bit like leptons and bosons, fast as light and almost weightless, but other types are like hadrons, heavy and bound by the Strong force. Yes, I have at some point read The Universe In A Nutshell, and no, I do not (to this day, one can still hope!) understand quantum physics. I know enough to see parallels, though. Electrons and photons - quick to spontaneously conjure from the field and quick to vanish; versus protons and neutrons - harder to excite but making up most of the mass in all things we can interact with. One potent like a lightning, one powerful like a surge. See what I’m getting at? --------


End file.
